Washington Marijuana Traceability – Lost Data

Since WeedTraQR is directly involved in the regulated marijuana business in Washington State we’re able to see first-hand some of the technical issues. One issue that has cropped up recently, affecting two of the last 64 transport manifests our customers have sent to the State are failing. The reason they are failing? The receiving party cannot locate these items in their system.

Marijuana Transport Manifest

The transport manifest implementation in Washington is a two part handshake. The sending party (our clients) generate this manifest which details the products being transported as well as the driver, vehicle, route and destination. Normal stuff. Once this manifest is generated in the State system (operated by BioTrackTHC) the receiving party should be able to look this up. For two manifests in question the receiving party is not able to see these items.

The Problem

When our user submitted these Manifests to the state system (through WeedTraQR) they left some critical manifest data (Employee) blank. We notified BioTrackTHC support about this issue on August 8th. As of August 12th this issue has not been resolved and customers for both WeedTraQR and BioTrackTHC Commercial version are negatively impacted by a simple problem.

How did this data get submitted blank? Our user simply forgot.

Why did WeedTraQR permit this errant data? Our system has to be designed to handle data that interfaces with the Washington State system provided by BioTrackTHC. The system provided allows this at the API level, therefore we have to allow the behavior (even if it is stupid).

Why did the State system allow this errant data to be entered? It’s clearly a bug.

Bigger Issues than One Small Bug

This is not the first “little” bug in this system. There are a large number of inconsistent behaviors in defined in this API, it’s design is terrible. The bigger issue here is that most folks in the new Marijuana business want the industry to succeed and it’s very difficult build that on top of a “traceability” system that has so many problems at the core.

Bottom Line

The system implemented in Washington State, which is now over a year old, continues to have very serious issues with it’s data integrity. The service provider the State system is slow to respond to these issues whether they are reported by a competitor (Us) or by users of the State free system or by users of their own Software.